1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to flight simulation systems, and more particularly to a flight simulation system incorporating an improved scenery database design, an improved overlay management system, and seeded scenery providing for enhanced performance.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Flight simulation systems are well known for both recreational purposes, such as applicants' previously developed MICROSOFT FLIGHT SIMULATOR version 4.0, and for non-recreational purposes, such as military applications and flight training. In such prior art systems, scenery was organized into blocks of data. When flying in the direction of a particular block, it would be loaded in to system memory while overwriting a block of scenery data that corresponds to scenery that was being flown away from. The effect of this is that whole scenery areas would pop up all at once in front of the aircraft. Transitions were very abrupt.
While such abrupt transitions and other deficiencies which exist in prior art flight simulation systems may be satisfactory under certain conditions, they detract from the processing efficiency of such systems and are undesirable. For example, this results in slow systems, wherein the display lags behind the actual motion of the aircraft and reduces the reality of the simulation. It is therefore an object of the present invention to improve the efficiency of such flight simulations systems, and to provide a novel method of organizing and accessing the scenery data to provide improved flight simulation.